Interview with Maxwell Schleifer, 1998

Hi~:her Administration in Education Doctoral Pro~:ram
Fall 1998
Interviewer: Ms. Julie Bell--Elikins
Interviewee: Dr. Maxwell Schleifer
Date: 11/6/98
Side A
Ms. Bell-Elkins: To group the questions into a couple of basic things: demographics,
personal history, university history, a little bit about students and then just some summary
questions.
Dr. Schleifer: Sure.
Ms. Bell-Elkins: Okay, we'll just dig in. Tell me about when you were hired at UMass
Boston.
Dr. Schleifer: It was the -- I was -- A friend of mine had just come back from finishing his
study of Anna Freud in the summer of '67. The group or the powers that be had decided to
get rid of the whole psychology department that existed. It was a -- not an unusual kind of
history that universities would have. The boundaries between the students and the faculty
were blurred. And you nevc~r knew whose butt was going to be ground up, and it was enough
of a scandal that they decided to dismiss that group in total. And the guy who --We were a
division system at the time, probably a system 'that we never should have left. We had a
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division of social sciences, and he decided the only decent thinking in psychology was
psychoanalytic ideas. We were going to be a psychoanalytically-oriented psychology
department of the United States and we were going -- we were going to develop a graduate
program to change the psychoanalytic child psychotherapy. And that's why they hired Bernie,
who had come back from working with Anna Freud. And we began to assemble that kind of
a faculty.
Ms. Bell-Elkins: Bernie?
Dr. Schleifer: Rosenblatt. And so I started in the fall of '67 and that was the dream.
Ms. Bell-Elkins: Okay.
Dr. Schleifer: The dream didn't last that long.
Ms. Bell-Elkins: Okay. So how long were you employed at the university?
Dr. Schleifer: I retired from the faculty, I guess it's -- it will be two years. It was two years
last June.
Ms. Bell-Elkins: Tell me a little bit about your ethnic background.
Dr. Schleifer: I'm Jewish. I grew up-- I'm one of the few people-- The other thing that
marked my stay here is that I'm one of the few people who grew up in Boston, went to the
Boston schools. And I played in the streets that our students played in, although they have
difficulty understanding anybody lived there before they did.
Ms. Bell-Elkins: What part of Boston?
Dr. Schleifer: I grew up ftrst near Franklin Field in Dorchester and then I moved to
Mattapan on the way up and out. I went to the-- you know, the Robert Treat [Paine] and I
started at the William Bradford. And then the next-- The first job I can remember, I went to
the Robert Treat, which was across from Franklin Field, and he was one of the signers of the
Declaration of Independence. And then I went to the Solomon Lowenberg, which was named
after some Jewish business man of the '30s. And then I went to the English High School in
Boston, which is known as 1the oldest high school in the country. And I went from there to
Harvard. I got my PhD in clinical psychology at BU [Boston University].
Ms. Bell-Elkins: Great. What was your initial position at UMass Boston?
Dr. Schleifer: I came in as an associate professor because I had had a lot of teaching
experience and various kinds and amounts of research done. You know, it was applied to
what the department was going to be like, but I had worked at medical schools and I got
some experience with children.
Just before I came here, the government had three big delinquency projects in the
country. There was one called "Mobilization for Youth," which was based on delinquency
and opportunity theory that later became the Office of Economic Opportunity. The notion
was if you gave adolescents opportunity, they would prosper. The. second one was to take a
look at delinquency in a small industrialized city, and they tried a group-dynamics approach
run by the University of Michigan. That is, the notion is if you sensitize the business leaders
to the needs of adolescents, then they will improve. And the last one is the one I ran. It was
done under consultation with the Newton School System and it was based on a
psychoanalytic model. Delinquency is not a scientific term; it's a legal term. A kid is a
delinquent if he is arrested on juvenile charges. It was a range of kids that would get
arrested. And we were looking at what we called the antisocial character disorder. We
looked at every kid between-- in one whole half of Newton and identified 150 kids who
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clinicians independently and blindly called antisocial character disorder, between nine and 14.
One-third were in a control group, one-third got everything we could do and one-third got a
school social program we designed. I like to tell people success of a research project is just
that; it's but a job.
And then I came from there to here. Here I was -- I got tenure -- I didn't understand.
I thought medical schools were crazy but in the medical school, in midst of the craziness, if
you said, "Patient," everybody would stop. There are no magic words at a university. When
I was on the Newton project, I spent a lot of time with the guy who was the head of the Pupil
and Personnel Services, who had also taught administration at Harvard. And what he told me
was that in education, all fri1endships are only allies. And I discovered that in the university,
there are no friendships or allies because you're always voting on the job. We call it tenure
but it's a job. You always want to get some body's job, so how can you maintain a friendship
with somebody who looks a1t you as a job person?
And the other thing I learned in the process is where power resides. And there are
two things that determine it. There's things that determine the size of the department and the
-- I guess they teach you this in administration, but there are three things that you need to
control: the power to appoint, the power over money and the power over space. A good
administrator needs two. If you've got three, you're in good shape. And so I watched our
struggles in this place over the years. We started with, remember, an urban mission. Then
we came to understand that people must be confused as to what an urban mission is. My
guess is that the public sees us as having an urban mission that we didn't want to abandon.
Ms. Bell-Elkins: How did your position change over time? In title or--
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Dr. Schleifer: Well, I was Chair for a while and then the administrative structure changed.
We were founded with the notion of having a college system. The ftrst Chancellor we had,
he left just as I was coming, a fellow named Ryan. I know that people will talk much about
him, but Ryan was a real builder who later went on to be the Chancellor at the University of
Indiana. He really had a very distinguished career, I guess you'd say.
So you're from Massachusetts?
Ms. Bell-Elkins: No, from Missouri.
Dr. Schleifer: Okay. When you get away from the wing and you begin to understand the
public university and the way that you grew up, you get a clue. My father went to the
University of Missouri. His sister was the ftrst graduate of the university's -- of the
University of Missouri's School of Geology. It has a different meaning in this state. Here,
the state university has little meaning. When I was growing up, it was an agricultural college
in Western Massachusetts. It had one period of great growth and opportunity. There was one
point in which the Speaker of the House, Bartley, and the head of the Senate, Donahue, and
the Governor, who also went to Massachusetts. That led to the great growth. A lot of the
things were growth, but that led to the ftrst time that there was any real money given to the
state university. The subsequent governors-- We haven't had a governor who has been a
product of public higher education. They all had their own parochial interests.
Ms. Bell-Elkins: When was that, that the three had the --
Dr. Schleifer: It was in the early '60s. A number of things happened all at once. The first-­They
had some control over cash. The Mass. Turnpike is now built. Remember, Western
Mass. used to be inaccessable. It used to be a terrible, three-and-a-half hour journey just to
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get to Amherst or Springfield. And the pressure built up. All the colleges were growing
around the country and it led to some other things -- That's why so many people were retiring
at the same time in the universities around the country. They were all appointed in the early
'60s.
When Ryan left, we had a Chancellor named Broderick, who I consider one of the
disasters of our time. He dedded that the university should be a democracy and there should
be one vote; every person should have the same equal vote, which then destroyed any
hierarchical order in the university. That meant that the assistant professors should have the
same rights as a full professor. So the issue of who decided and who should have authority
was in turmoil during that whole period of time. The other thing that, again, I didn't
understand at the time because -- I was on the planning committee for what was then called
College Three. It was a good group of people because it was the first time I had really had a
chance to meet people from other departments. We spent six months of enormous labor
producing a document. Chancellor Broderick thanked us for the document and dismissed it
immediately because he had his own plan. That's when I discbvered that that's what they call
co-opting. The group was furious. They were going to go protest and they were going to tell
him he had done the wrong thing, etc., etc. So there were three of us who went; one of them
is Babcock, who is now in administration. Charlie, I think his name is. And one of us had
tenure at the time because this was our second year. As angry as they were outside of the
room, when we got to the room, they were quiet. It left me to speak. And then I realized
that their trade was teaching and, if they were fired, they were without a trade. But my trade,
although I was teaching, if I got fired from this job, I had another trade that I could fall back
on. And then I began to realize that this had become the nature of control at the university;
that if you protest, you threaten your job in a way. Academic freedom is a funny kind of a
business.
The other thing, which I'm glad to put in the minutes, is the research assistant for us
on the staff was Richard Fre:eland, who is now president of Northeastern. Richard has had a
very rocky career here. I'm delighted to put it all on record. The president of the overall
university was Robert Wood!, who came from-- And he ran the university the way a
politician runs --
Ms. Bell-Elkins: He came from where?
Dr. Schleifer: He came from-- He had been first secretary of HUD. And he ran the place
the way a decent politician does. What a politician does when he appoints people, they sign
their letter of resignation undated so there's no fight about getting rid of them. They just date
it. So we have letters of resignation from everybody around. And he and Broderick had
gone to Princeton together. Broderick wanted the upper wealthy classes and Wood wanted
the working boys. They had hated each other since they'd been undergraduates. It was just a
matter of time until Wood was going to force Broderick out. Since you couldn't trust him, he
said, "Oh, Freeland can be the staff assistant," who was supposed to essentially spy on what
Broderick was doing to Wood. He was very tactful and handled it with great delicacy. He
was a good administrator for all the time he was here. He started the business school and
then he became Dean of the College of Liberal Arts.
Ms. Bell-Elkins: This was ,;vood?
Dr. Schleifer: No, Freeland.
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Ms. Bell-Elkins: Freeland, okay.
Dr. Schleifer: He was staff assistant and he then got involved in an intense power struggle
with Sherry Penney. And Penney got rid of him. And in the great ironies of all time, they
were both candidates for president of N ortheastem and, at this point, Freeland got the ultimate
revenge and, I guess, is living well. By destroying the hierarchy, it really then created a
structure that floundered for a long time.
The other thing as long as you're dealing with the history, I hadn't realized -- We
started a place that means hilgh teachers. I pad a cousin who started at the University of
California, San Diego, about the same time. They're about the same age as we are, and they
are now one of the preemintmt universities of the world. They have more Nobel winners than
Berkeley does. They made a commitment of excellence from the beginning. A commitment
to excellence as a starting place is ultimately brutal, because what happened was we had all
kinds of people who everybody who hired them knew had no chance they were ever going to
get tenure. We were hiring high school German teachers and English teachers, people who
had dreamt of teaching in a university. As the first round of tenure came, then they started to
try to get rid of some these people that we had to fight back. Now that Broderick had given
them equal votes, there were great revolutions in the departments that led to really a lot of
turmoil that was unfortunate but probably necessary. In other words, all of them-- We had
one guy who ultimately was -- He had been a high school English teacher for years and he
had been brought in and they couldn't understand why he didn't get tenure. Once you started
to take -- When you get into the debate of tenure, it's tough and I will go on record as being
very conservative on it. That is, if you're a university, we're subsidized people.
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Theoretically, they pay us to read and write and, therefore, you've got to have some standards
about the quality of the reading and writing. Years ago, you didn't get tenure until you were
in your forties and you had demonstrated that you were going to work on your own.
Basically, what you have now is a person whose major research has been their thesis and
they've unrolled their thesis. You learn in your life that for some people, that's the last piece
of research they've done and then you get locked in, ill funny kinds of way. That was a very
tragic f>eriod but it also didn't allow us to define particular kinds of goals at that time. They
made a radical shift, probably a decade ago.
So that the reason our program had trouble is in those revolutionary years of the late
'60s in terms of what happened, the junior faculty decided that graduate programs were
terrible, because that would have meant they wouldn't have tenure. So it put on hold all the
graduate programs for at least a decade. And then the graduate programs were determined by
the superintendent and other political powers were the largest department in the university,
the English department, who had the first graduate program. The next largest department was
the history department. So there's been this kind of -- And then there's been a struggle with
the political forces in the university. We are not a powerful state university. So that we had
put together a package for a very decent aging program far before the aging program was in
College Three. Out of the psychology department, we had three people who really weren't
able to go elsewhere to find other retirements. But a graduate program has to be approved by
a cluster of trustees, and one of them was a Brandeis faculty in their aging program and she
turned us down. You know, so you had this kind of-- John Silber--
Ms. Bell-Elkins: To cut the competition?
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Dr. Schleifer: Yeah. And the other thing is John Silber -- The one thing he did for his BU
faculty that we never understood, he forced us to restrict our evening college and our summer
offerings because most places make their money in their evening school. He didn't want the
competition and he therefore protected the other universities. Wood was willing to go along
with that. So that was another thing that hampered us. Again, we were the state university.
I think also there's bt~en intense prejudice against this campus. We were seen as the
black college, and throw them a bone and leave them alone. You saw it in a number of
ways. I was president of the State Psychological Association for a period of time. When we
were first here, we had -- A lot of our members were arguing over things we should do for
inner-city kids, but when I invited them to have the annual meeting at the university, they
were afraid to come. This has been kind of a dilemma that we've had and one of the reasons
I've always been interested in the athletic department. We need many ways of bringing
people to the campus so they won't be afraid of what the surroundings are and what their
prejudices are.
Ms. Bell-Elkins: Can you describe what the relationship has been between the faculty and the
administration?
Dr. Schleifer: Well, it's been-- Before the union, it depended on whether you-- There were
sides. There were sides that supported the Chair and there were sides that didn't. I was
opposed to the union for a long time. I thought that when you went to a state university, you
only had to deal with the legislature as with the union. There (lre many things about the
union that I don't like. Just philosophically, it's labor and management now. And anybody
that determines another is sort of kidding themselves. I've never seen labor and management
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feel-- So there's a kind of pretense on some level that we're in this together. Well, we're not
in this together. They have different determinators. And that's what's happened, since we
have a legislature that is really hit by public universities. I have been delighted that
[William] Bulger is president for lots of reasons. What happens in any state -- Well, what I
learned about the state universities, once you get out to the Midwest, the state university -- in
the state university states is the research arm of the state legislature.
Ms. Bell-Elkins: Right.
Dr. Schleifer: And therefore, the state legislature sees very directly the value they get. Well,
we're not the research arm of the legislature, although the public institution has done better.
And so that-- We have all-·- Weld and Cellucci blocked the pay raises for years. I knew
Dukakis well; he had been my lawyer. I was in planning development at this place and I
learned a lot about pl~g development, but in order to preserve all the space, we ran all
the parking underneath. All Dukakis would talk about was two things: Why did we spend
$10,000 per parking space, as if this wasn't part of an integral plan, and why did we need
such a good library? He'd grind them. For them-- What was their view of us as a university
if they were wondering what kind of a library we have? And he's quibbling about-- We had
$50 million appropriated for the athletic building. He had come -- Dukakis had come to the
meeting-- Ordinarily, we had to take them to court to get the money. There's a lot of things.
The people who were originally planning the place, again, I'll deal with them a little later, but
they understood how to run -- how to create a university education. For example, what they
taught me about architecture is, structure determines function. They are only two large
lecture halls in this university. All the other rooms are for 50-- 25 or 50. So they
committed us to small classes for the foreseeable future in a way I didn't understand when I
first started to come here.
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The other thing is thtey made a commitment to not have high-level intercollegiate
athletics. So they kept most of the positions in the faculty. Athletic departments are sorted
by faculty positions throughout the country, if you're a state university. You get so many
faculty positions per so many students and then you allocate them. So if you've got a big
athletic department, you know those positions have come out of the faculty teaching. So we
didn't do that. On the other hand, we really had a state system that was vulnerable without
the support of the athletic program here.
Ms. Bell-Elkins: Why is that --
Dr. Schleifer: It's apparently --
Ms. Bell-Elkins: --in your opinion? (Laughs)
Dr. Schleifer: Apparently, they're trying not to support us at all. Then when you're in the
place -- We cleared up under political pressures. People had the fantasy that we are being
royally treated here. The way to understand this whole university from the beginning is the
way you would understand cmy deprived organism. When a family doesn't have enough, it
turns on each other. So we have suffered internal battles with every department with the
fantasy that every department has more money. The surrounding community had the same
fantasy. They had been stealing our athletic grounds with the justification of the state
legislature. Students from all of the athletic stock here, when this athletic program started,
we used to have 10 faculty positions allocated to the -- and all the other money comes out of
student funds and the rental space. The whole university has not had any maintenance
money, you know, so we're crumbling. Neither has the athletic department, this thing is
crumbling now. It needs enormous amounts of repair, and God only knows what's going to
happen five years from now. It manages to hold the whole plan.
We got involved in a. political plan in which we were thrown to the wolves last year.
Some little Pop Warner group decided that -- They used to practice at BC [Boston College]
and they decided that we-- the athletic department didn't do anything for the community.
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We have more service to tht~ community than any department in the whole university. We
held all the high school athletic events and we-- I mean, and they forced us to let them play
for nothing on the outer fields. And we take this time -- (unintelligible). This is because the
state legislature, they see us in this community and we do nothing.
So there was a tremendous distortion about the role of the university. I think there's --
1 have other kinds of questions I'd be-- I can get some answered. I can't understand why a
student would go to Suffolk rather than UMass Boston. It's cheaper and better. So there's a
kind of a view of us that's still-- I guess, back to Bulger. The state-- The Governor appoints
the Trustees to the university and, if the president ever spoke out against -- If the Governor
wanted -- If the university wants more money and the Governor wants to cut taxes, you get
rid of the president. You've got to get rid of Bulger.
Ms. Bell-Elkins: Right.
Dr. Schleifer: And so we had at least a short time where-- They're not going to be able to
cut us and chill us if he speaks out. And we've never really been able to do it. Again, like
the Midwestern universities like my father went to, the president of the university is talking to
the people of the state, saying, "If you really want your kids to go to college and get a decent
education, you've got to support us." For the first time a president of ours would say that,
they'd have a new Chancellor the next week.
Ms. Bell-Elkins: Did you ever consider leaving UMass Boston?
Dr. Schleifer: Yes. (Laughs)
Ms. Bell-Elkins: Okay. Why or why not?
ltt
Dr. Schleifer: Well, I think I had to make some decisions. You know, I was offered things.
I think if I hadn't grown up in Boston and I didn't have other kinds of commitments, I think I
would have left probably in the '70s when I really had a chance to do some things. I had an
interesting deal at one point, and I started a magazine for families with kids with disabilities,
which is now has a subscription of 35,000. And so I had a chance to do that while I was
doing my teaching, etc. You know, the other thing -- The question again: How do you
measure a faculty? In other words -- I always was involved professionally. I had access to
research and other kinds of things that the poor junior faculty coming from out of town didn't
have. The satisfaction I had hoped to get out of graduate students -- I was on the Smith
School's associate faculty [of Social Work] for 30 years. I don't know if you know -- See, it's
an interesting thing. Basically, they started the doctoral program in '65 and Smith has all its
classes in the summer.
Ms. Bell-Elkins: Right. I'm familiar with their system.
Dr. Schleifer: Okay. And the doctoral students were initially all placed in Boston. So I was
a dissertation advisor and I was more convenient during the winter for them than anyone else,
and I went out once a week in the summer. That at least gave me the kind of gratification-­That
gave me some balance that most of the other people really couldn't do.
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Ms. Bell-Elkins: What was the mission of the university when you arrived?
Dr. Schleifer: Well, we said it was an urban mission. And we said that what we wanted to
do was produce a variety of very high quality education for inner-city kids. Again, you will
hear from others about the original view of Gagnon, who was really the pioneer, and a
dilemma. As I said, he had the vision of -- notion of education of the man. His basic idea
was good. I guess you would say that the first two years would be like a back-to-basics. But
it was an effort to provide them and it had a philosophy of education. But it meant for two
years the students had less choices than they had in junior high school for courses to take.
So, you know, it lacked some flexibility.
So when the attack came around tenure issues, it was a disaster. What you really
began to realize for the first time when they tried to change the curriculum in a decent way,
there were trade unions here. The English department wanted to retain their power and we
really wanted to control the required courses. And the language department, which was a real
problem-- I don't know if we still have as many, but everything was language and
translation. There was one period of time I thought -- Even if they hit with you with
psychology courses to read requirements -- Freud, after all, was written in German; that could
have been language. I mearL, we had that kind of craziness going on and we still do. Now
when I hear them talking about curriculum, you say to yourself, "How many positions does it
need to run?" And because of the lack of hierarchical order, there was nobody around to
protect the weaker departments. I learned about that by accident. They had a crazy chairman
of the Classics department and they were put into a receivership. So there were three of us in
the Classics department for years. So that gave me another education. We're trying to save
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· -- They're closing classics departments all over the country and we began to realize, what
makes a university? Is it relevance? Is it -- So those things should be the fabric of the
university. Nobody's --When you're worried about protecting your own department, who's
worried about what the thing looks like as a whole? And I never had any decent sense of the
kind of administration we've had in the last decade. I understand it, but I'm sure they chair it
alL
Ms. Bell-Elkins: What were the biggest concerns on campus during the early years?
Dr. Schleifer: Well, there was one group, as I pointed out, that wanted tenure. The other
thing, you know, we first were involved with-- We were located in Copley Square and the
question was: Where were we going to go? We had wanted to build in Copley Square and
we would have flourished in a different way because most of our students were -- They
worked too many hours, and that's a whole other thing. When we were in the Copley Square
area, the insurance companies absorbed all kinds of part-time labor. So we had students who
would go to class in the morning, work three hours in the afternoon, and they'd come back to
the library at night. We're abandoned out here. If a student leaves you, they don't come
back. It has changed the whole texture of the place. So we wanted to be in Copley Square,
but the business persons didn't want us. Then when we wanted to go to the Watertown
Arsenal, they didn't want us.. The only persons who couldn't defend themselves were the city
dump. So that's where we are; we're over the old city dump, next to a housing project that
didn't want us either, but they didn't have much leverage.
Ms. Bell-Elkins: You talked a little bit about this, but what were the curricular offerings at
that time and how have they changed?
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Dr. Schleifer: Well, as I've said, there were specific required courses in English and in the
social sciences, managemen1t but there might have been 16 courses-- there might have been
18 and then you could take anything you wanted. And then we started to reassemble kind of
in the last years a curriculum. Again, and partly because of the changing nature of our
students and our faculty, that we started before grade inflation really hit and other things
really -- You know, we had that whole debate about why should you grade or why shouldn't
we. Obviously, I was much more concerned-- I said, "Not grading is lazy," because then
you don't have to make any evaluations at all. And my argument then and always has been is
that students -- it didn't help the students to accept. I said, "When you have a place that
nobody knows about, if they don't trust your grades, what are they going to trust?" And you
start to do what we did where th!! grades are meaningless then. So that was a whole debate
at the time.
Ms. Bell-Elkins: What was your role in creating the curriculum at the college?
Dr. Schleifer: Well, I inherited -- I came at the third year. I challenged it within the
framework that I trusted and I did not want the changes of nothing. I think the other thing
that then happened at the same time was the nature of our student body changed. You know,
I'm not sure if I would argue they were better or worse but, remember, we had some students
-- If you gave a student a C at that time, they were grateful. I had a student who was much
more characteristic before I :retired. I had a class where I-- You know, the term paper was
the last thing they did and I let them turn it in a week early. Somebody turned in their paper
a week early, called me and wanted to know what I thought. I said, "Well, it's a good stuff,
but it needs a lot of work." He said, "God, I did eight hours work on that paper." We really
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get into that kind of dilemma of -- And so that -- As we take in more students for whatever
reason, unless -- You know, somebody had once proposed that we start -- We didn't deal with
the first two years of college but we started sort of the third year of college and let the junior
colleges do the work. Most college faculty aren't prepared to teach freshmen; they don't want
to teach freshmen; they're not good at it. When we merged with Boston State, we got rid of
the Boston State people, but they were much better at teaching beginning students at the
undergraduate level than we were. And there's nothing in your graduate education that
prepares you to do that. Th1ere were two or three very good junior colleges. If they came
from Cape Cod Community College, they would do well here. There were other junior
colleges that they came from that were disasters, but that would have changed how we had to
deal with--
Ms. Bell-Elkins: I guess so .. How would you describe the internal governance structure at
the time, when it started?
Dr. Schleifer: I felt it was reasonable when they started and then I think I thought it got silly.
Ms. Bell-Elkins: ·Okay.
Dr. Schleifer: And it had to do with the definition of the democracy. Again, I was much
more structured than what they were. I argued that -- I wanted to get the experience was part
of it. I can remember when I was an undergraduate, I had a course with a guy named
Gordon Allport who was really very famous. The world's worst lecturer, very long. I mean,
he could put you to sleep. You know, he would write nine points on the board. Probably 15
months later, I had a decent graduate course in personality at BU Gradate School. I spent
some time organizing my le1ctures and writing them out. 11len I went back to look at my
undergraduate notes and I h:ad not realized until that moment that he changed the way I
taught.
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So if you kept to this issue of how do you evaluate the impact of an education? Are
you going to evaluate it the day you fake it or five years later? I thought that some of those
people who were senior to me had some sense of what an educational process should look
like. And they should have been the ones that determined what the curriculum looked like.
The radical -- the radical ones, they wanted people to be taught just the way they were. They
were really -- So when you have junior faculty now determining curriculum and then they
added the students, and my argument was students should determine where they were and
fight for that. They should determine why we were out here, a whole sort of things. But
once they were put together,. they were completely co-opted. They ruled nothing because
they didn't show up and a whole host of things. So at the most democratic time, we were the
most dictatorial because two or three people had a lot of time to plan and do nothing else but
plan, plan the way the thing went.
Ms. Bell-Elkins: How would you describe the external governance structure at that time?
Dr. Schleifer: Are you talking about-- Well, again, when you live in a state that doesn't
understand the role of publi': higher education, that's terrible.
Ms. Bell-Elkins: Was there any outside group at that time that really influenced the progress
of the early institution?
Dr. Schleifer: Surely.
Ms. Bell-Elkins: Who?
Dr. Schleifer: I mean, people like Silber and the others, they didn't want it to succeed. The
20
Globe didn't want it to succeed. We've had the most farcical relationship with the newspaper
that you can imagine. I always felt they thought we were blockirig their view of the ocean.
Ms. Bell-Elkins: (Laughs) How would you describe the student body?
Dr. Schleifer: It's very uneven. There's two things about it. First of all, they're the last of
the grateful students. They're not like the suburban students who have been fed too much and
too long. There's a level of-- There's a belief in the educational process that exceeds what it
is and currently we have suc:h a range of things. There are several kinds of students who do
well out here and then we h:ave some changes. There are kids from small towns who have
never realized how smart tht!y were. I mean, the kids from Hanover and Dartmouth. So
there's a group of them that become worldly. Then we've got the Cambridge underground.
The kids go to the ivy league schools and make $40,000 and they go wander around
Cambridge for about five to 10 years. All of a sudden, they discover the other side of the
planet. At the end of the Red Line, there's a university there. By that time, they're older and
the trashing around has taken place and they do very well. And then there are people who
come by accident to be with their husbands or wives and need to finish up college. So that's
some of our best students.
Ms. Bell-Elkins: How was :it founded as a commuter institution?
Dr. Schleifer: Well, that's rough. First of all, the issue of what to do with dormitories didn't
arise until we built this campus. And that was a pledge made to the housing project that we
wouldn't overwhelm them, which was a mistake. We should not have dormitories for 12,000,
we should have dormitories for three. I had proposed two things when I was on the planning
committee early on. I wanted a YMCA-like hotel because kids have such chaotic lives, that I
21
wanted a place that they had to leave their house for the transition and they had someplace to
stay. I had proposed building learning centers in five areas in Greater Boston. In other
words, I did some studies that were long and involved. Basically, our students don't define
themselves as students except on this campus. They're not redefined at home; they're not
redefined at work. And I felt that if you could put one in Everett and one in Roxbury, which
was a building which had study halls, etc., etc., then they could rent even some of their social
events. At least in that building, they could define themselves as students.
I commuted for one semester to college and my parents redefmed my role about my
calling so that they didn't have company during the week, etc., etc. Our feelings don't make
any changes. One of the things we do with the athletic department is we have a dinner for
the parents for the freshman athletes. I tell them why kids go to college and I talk about the
dilemma of a commuting student, but those are the kinds of dilemmas so many of our
younger students have that really aren't resolved. Most commuting schools are based on the
notion that the kid gets his medical care at home if he's commuting. There's no systematic -­I
mean, if we just did a Head Start with many of our freshmen, checked their teeth and their
eyes, that would provide a s~ervice.
Ms. Bell-Elkins: What do you think the future holds for UMass Boston?
Dr. Schleifer: (Laughs) It depends on how optimistic or pessimistic I feel about the no-tax
pledges. That is, I would hope that someday -- You know, when you visit your friends in
California, they don't worry about the tuition issues with their kids. I have two sons that go
to the University of California, San Diego. I could have flown them home once a month for
what it would have cost me to send them to one of the local private universities. So I
22.
discovered that that's the onlly option for the middle class, is to support a strong state
university. And how they're: going to deal with the kind of craziness that we're dealing with
now in the short run, I just don't know.
Ms. Bell-Elkins: What do you think is the greatest strength of UMass Boston?
Dr. Schleifer: It has a very decent target and, because of the structure, we have very small
classes. Our freshmen have smaller classes than BU seniors.
Ms. Bell-Elkins: What do you think's the weakness, though, on the other side?
Dr. Schleifer: Because it's so fractionated, you have the pieces of it. If you meet a UMass
faculty member someplace else and you ask them about themselves, they'll tell you what
college they graduated from:, often not where they teach. And how to create a sense of
identity on the campus itself for the faculty and then for the students has been our greatest
internal struggle.
Ms. Bell-Elkins: Through all of this, what was your most memorable moment at UMass
Boston, or event?
Dr. Schleifer: Well, again,][-- You sooner or later have to decide something that meets your
own sense of self-esteem. Because of the connections I had with graduate schools in
psychiatry and social work, that I was able to get a small number of students into graduate
school every year. That's what I considered that that's what I brought and that's what I could
accomplish. A lot of them have done very well.
I was just reading in the newspaper the other week that one of the early graduates was
a woman named Susan Lind and at 70, she decided she wanted to be a puppeteer. Integrate
that with psychology, she's now the associate director of the Judge Baker Guidance Center in
23
charge of media. She has now put together a series of albums and songs, you know, for PBS,
etc., etc.
We had a whole series of students who-- Remember, the other nice thing about-­This
is the university-- When a student wants to see a faculty member, they don't have to
compete with throngs of 30 trying to see them. So that the students that you work with really
have access to you and so that, I would argue, is the feeling of what did I do. Those would
be the things I feel I enjoyed the most.
Ms. Bell-Elkins: I'm really intrigued. Tell me about your journey from being a teacher in
psychology to really making this link with the athletics.
Dr. Schleifer: (Laughs) Well, again, without bel&boring it, again, I've always worried ever
since I -- I was trained as a clinician with children and delinquency was an area that I -- I
spent a lot of time worrying about what to do with schools. In my own life, the place -- I'd
argue several things. I knew for myself and my own kids -- I have three sons and a daughter,
who all played athletics in Newton -- the only place of integration in any suburban
community is the athletic field. You're judged on whether you can play or not, not who your
parents are, etc., etc. It's really the place for me; the only place I really met kids outside my
neighborhood was on the athletic field so that I always enjoyed it, if I stayed with it. I mean,
I was always on the athletic committee one way or another. When I retired, I had had some
ideas that I'd bid some of and not others. So that, for example, I had believed that, you
know, in a schmaltzy way, that the inner-city leaders were going to come from inner-city
kids. And we had a grant for a year, and a little bit last year, that I just didn't consult
anymore. Again, I'll tell you more about that, in which I had five in the high school; the best
24
male and female junior-- se~nior athletes with some promise. We got the morning jobs at the
university and they brought us to teach in the university in the afternoon. And that's gone
reasonably well and that could be expanded. When the -- When I ftrst started consulting, the
university got a big Kellogg grant to change the way the departments do business with their
students. I submitted a grant in the athletic department and which I felt ultimately was going
to be the perfect model. We got some monies which we used. And I argued that a high
school athlete is evaluated every day and, on the basis of the evaluation, has to change in
order -- And they had to learn through emotional and physical distress. These are the very
skills you needed to learn anything. They were so compartmentalized by themselves, by their
coaches, by their families and by their teachers, that they never really put themselves
together. And I put togethe1r a program to intersect with that. For example, that's what the
breakfast -- the dinner is about. I've got a group of faculty who at least understand that I'm
trying not to make a first alarm system. We've changed some of the tutoring. My niece,
who's a headhunter, gave me 15 traits, successive traits that she learned from sports. Some of
the coaches are trying to use that and we're trying to change that. And the academic records
of the athletes in general is higher than the average student body here, and the same things
we're trying to do with this group here really should be done with all the students.
Ms. Bell-Elkins: Have you ever looked at any of the work that Pat Summers (phonetic)
worked on for female athlett~s?
Dr. Schleifer: No.
Ms. Bell-Elkins: It's very similar too. All of them graduate over 3.5.
Dr. Schleifer: Yeah, I mean it's not a -- Yeah. Especially here, there's no reward. It's a
division of -- With the -- They have this vision that we're a Division I group. This is
Division III. These kids take it out of their own hide.
25
Ms. Bell-Elkins: Just one more question: What would you most like observers or historians
of the university's early history to know?
Dr. Schleifer: I think the people who -- The people like Dick Powers and Gagnon and one or
two others, like Ryan, who really had a great vision that I didn't understand when I joined it,
but as I got to really respect what they really added to it and really how kids need to be
educated. I hope someday we'll reaiscover the vision.
Ms. Bell-Elkins: Great. Thank you so much for taking time out of your busy day to be part
of this history.
Dr. Schleifer: You're welcome.

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Transcription

Hi~:her Administration in Education Doctoral Pro~:ram
Fall 1998
Interviewer: Ms. Julie Bell--Elikins
Interviewee: Dr. Maxwell Schleifer
Date: 11/6/98
Side A
Ms. Bell-Elkins: To group the questions into a couple of basic things: demographics,
personal history, university history, a little bit about students and then just some summary
questions.
Dr. Schleifer: Sure.
Ms. Bell-Elkins: Okay, we'll just dig in. Tell me about when you were hired at UMass
Boston.
Dr. Schleifer: It was the -- I was -- A friend of mine had just come back from finishing his
study of Anna Freud in the summer of '67. The group or the powers that be had decided to
get rid of the whole psychology department that existed. It was a -- not an unusual kind of
history that universities would have. The boundaries between the students and the faculty
were blurred. And you nevc~r knew whose butt was going to be ground up, and it was enough
of a scandal that they decided to dismiss that group in total. And the guy who --We were a
division system at the time, probably a system 'that we never should have left. We had a
2
division of social sciences, and he decided the only decent thinking in psychology was
psychoanalytic ideas. We were going to be a psychoanalytically-oriented psychology
department of the United States and we were going -- we were going to develop a graduate
program to change the psychoanalytic child psychotherapy. And that's why they hired Bernie,
who had come back from working with Anna Freud. And we began to assemble that kind of
a faculty.
Ms. Bell-Elkins: Bernie?
Dr. Schleifer: Rosenblatt. And so I started in the fall of '67 and that was the dream.
Ms. Bell-Elkins: Okay.
Dr. Schleifer: The dream didn't last that long.
Ms. Bell-Elkins: Okay. So how long were you employed at the university?
Dr. Schleifer: I retired from the faculty, I guess it's -- it will be two years. It was two years
last June.
Ms. Bell-Elkins: Tell me a little bit about your ethnic background.
Dr. Schleifer: I'm Jewish. I grew up-- I'm one of the few people-- The other thing that
marked my stay here is that I'm one of the few people who grew up in Boston, went to the
Boston schools. And I played in the streets that our students played in, although they have
difficulty understanding anybody lived there before they did.
Ms. Bell-Elkins: What part of Boston?
Dr. Schleifer: I grew up ftrst near Franklin Field in Dorchester and then I moved to
Mattapan on the way up and out. I went to the-- you know, the Robert Treat [Paine] and I
started at the William Bradford. And then the next-- The first job I can remember, I went to
the Robert Treat, which was across from Franklin Field, and he was one of the signers of the
Declaration of Independence. And then I went to the Solomon Lowenberg, which was named
after some Jewish business man of the '30s. And then I went to the English High School in
Boston, which is known as 1the oldest high school in the country. And I went from there to
Harvard. I got my PhD in clinical psychology at BU [Boston University].
Ms. Bell-Elkins: Great. What was your initial position at UMass Boston?
Dr. Schleifer: I came in as an associate professor because I had had a lot of teaching
experience and various kinds and amounts of research done. You know, it was applied to
what the department was going to be like, but I had worked at medical schools and I got
some experience with children.
Just before I came here, the government had three big delinquency projects in the
country. There was one called "Mobilization for Youth," which was based on delinquency
and opportunity theory that later became the Office of Economic Opportunity. The notion
was if you gave adolescents opportunity, they would prosper. The. second one was to take a
look at delinquency in a small industrialized city, and they tried a group-dynamics approach
run by the University of Michigan. That is, the notion is if you sensitize the business leaders
to the needs of adolescents, then they will improve. And the last one is the one I ran. It was
done under consultation with the Newton School System and it was based on a
psychoanalytic model. Delinquency is not a scientific term; it's a legal term. A kid is a
delinquent if he is arrested on juvenile charges. It was a range of kids that would get
arrested. And we were looking at what we called the antisocial character disorder. We
looked at every kid between-- in one whole half of Newton and identified 150 kids who
4
clinicians independently and blindly called antisocial character disorder, between nine and 14.
One-third were in a control group, one-third got everything we could do and one-third got a
school social program we designed. I like to tell people success of a research project is just
that; it's but a job.
And then I came from there to here. Here I was -- I got tenure -- I didn't understand.
I thought medical schools were crazy but in the medical school, in midst of the craziness, if
you said, "Patient," everybody would stop. There are no magic words at a university. When
I was on the Newton project, I spent a lot of time with the guy who was the head of the Pupil
and Personnel Services, who had also taught administration at Harvard. And what he told me
was that in education, all fri1endships are only allies. And I discovered that in the university,
there are no friendships or allies because you're always voting on the job. We call it tenure
but it's a job. You always want to get some body's job, so how can you maintain a friendship
with somebody who looks a1t you as a job person?
And the other thing I learned in the process is where power resides. And there are
two things that determine it. There's things that determine the size of the department and the
-- I guess they teach you this in administration, but there are three things that you need to
control: the power to appoint, the power over money and the power over space. A good
administrator needs two. If you've got three, you're in good shape. And so I watched our
struggles in this place over the years. We started with, remember, an urban mission. Then
we came to understand that people must be confused as to what an urban mission is. My
guess is that the public sees us as having an urban mission that we didn't want to abandon.
Ms. Bell-Elkins: How did your position change over time? In title or--
5
Dr. Schleifer: Well, I was Chair for a while and then the administrative structure changed.
We were founded with the notion of having a college system. The ftrst Chancellor we had,
he left just as I was coming, a fellow named Ryan. I know that people will talk much about
him, but Ryan was a real builder who later went on to be the Chancellor at the University of
Indiana. He really had a very distinguished career, I guess you'd say.
So you're from Massachusetts?
Ms. Bell-Elkins: No, from Missouri.
Dr. Schleifer: Okay. When you get away from the wing and you begin to understand the
public university and the way that you grew up, you get a clue. My father went to the
University of Missouri. His sister was the ftrst graduate of the university's -- of the
University of Missouri's School of Geology. It has a different meaning in this state. Here,
the state university has little meaning. When I was growing up, it was an agricultural college
in Western Massachusetts. It had one period of great growth and opportunity. There was one
point in which the Speaker of the House, Bartley, and the head of the Senate, Donahue, and
the Governor, who also went to Massachusetts. That led to the great growth. A lot of the
things were growth, but that led to the ftrst time that there was any real money given to the
state university. The subsequent governors-- We haven't had a governor who has been a
product of public higher education. They all had their own parochial interests.
Ms. Bell-Elkins: When was that, that the three had the --
Dr. Schleifer: It was in the early '60s. A number of things happened all at once. The first-­They
had some control over cash. The Mass. Turnpike is now built. Remember, Western
Mass. used to be inaccessable. It used to be a terrible, three-and-a-half hour journey just to
6
get to Amherst or Springfield. And the pressure built up. All the colleges were growing
around the country and it led to some other things -- That's why so many people were retiring
at the same time in the universities around the country. They were all appointed in the early
'60s.
When Ryan left, we had a Chancellor named Broderick, who I consider one of the
disasters of our time. He dedded that the university should be a democracy and there should
be one vote; every person should have the same equal vote, which then destroyed any
hierarchical order in the university. That meant that the assistant professors should have the
same rights as a full professor. So the issue of who decided and who should have authority
was in turmoil during that whole period of time. The other thing that, again, I didn't
understand at the time because -- I was on the planning committee for what was then called
College Three. It was a good group of people because it was the first time I had really had a
chance to meet people from other departments. We spent six months of enormous labor
producing a document. Chancellor Broderick thanked us for the document and dismissed it
immediately because he had his own plan. That's when I discbvered that that's what they call
co-opting. The group was furious. They were going to go protest and they were going to tell
him he had done the wrong thing, etc., etc. So there were three of us who went; one of them
is Babcock, who is now in administration. Charlie, I think his name is. And one of us had
tenure at the time because this was our second year. As angry as they were outside of the
room, when we got to the room, they were quiet. It left me to speak. And then I realized
that their trade was teaching and, if they were fired, they were without a trade. But my trade,
although I was teaching, if I got fired from this job, I had another trade that I could fall back
on. And then I began to realize that this had become the nature of control at the university;
that if you protest, you threaten your job in a way. Academic freedom is a funny kind of a
business.
The other thing, which I'm glad to put in the minutes, is the research assistant for us
on the staff was Richard Fre:eland, who is now president of Northeastern. Richard has had a
very rocky career here. I'm delighted to put it all on record. The president of the overall
university was Robert Wood!, who came from-- And he ran the university the way a
politician runs --
Ms. Bell-Elkins: He came from where?
Dr. Schleifer: He came from-- He had been first secretary of HUD. And he ran the place
the way a decent politician does. What a politician does when he appoints people, they sign
their letter of resignation undated so there's no fight about getting rid of them. They just date
it. So we have letters of resignation from everybody around. And he and Broderick had
gone to Princeton together. Broderick wanted the upper wealthy classes and Wood wanted
the working boys. They had hated each other since they'd been undergraduates. It was just a
matter of time until Wood was going to force Broderick out. Since you couldn't trust him, he
said, "Oh, Freeland can be the staff assistant," who was supposed to essentially spy on what
Broderick was doing to Wood. He was very tactful and handled it with great delicacy. He
was a good administrator for all the time he was here. He started the business school and
then he became Dean of the College of Liberal Arts.
Ms. Bell-Elkins: This was ,;vood?
Dr. Schleifer: No, Freeland.
8
Ms. Bell-Elkins: Freeland, okay.
Dr. Schleifer: He was staff assistant and he then got involved in an intense power struggle
with Sherry Penney. And Penney got rid of him. And in the great ironies of all time, they
were both candidates for president of N ortheastem and, at this point, Freeland got the ultimate
revenge and, I guess, is living well. By destroying the hierarchy, it really then created a
structure that floundered for a long time.
The other thing as long as you're dealing with the history, I hadn't realized -- We
started a place that means hilgh teachers. I pad a cousin who started at the University of
California, San Diego, about the same time. They're about the same age as we are, and they
are now one of the preemintmt universities of the world. They have more Nobel winners than
Berkeley does. They made a commitment of excellence from the beginning. A commitment
to excellence as a starting place is ultimately brutal, because what happened was we had all
kinds of people who everybody who hired them knew had no chance they were ever going to
get tenure. We were hiring high school German teachers and English teachers, people who
had dreamt of teaching in a university. As the first round of tenure came, then they started to
try to get rid of some these people that we had to fight back. Now that Broderick had given
them equal votes, there were great revolutions in the departments that led to really a lot of
turmoil that was unfortunate but probably necessary. In other words, all of them-- We had
one guy who ultimately was -- He had been a high school English teacher for years and he
had been brought in and they couldn't understand why he didn't get tenure. Once you started
to take -- When you get into the debate of tenure, it's tough and I will go on record as being
very conservative on it. That is, if you're a university, we're subsidized people.
9
Theoretically, they pay us to read and write and, therefore, you've got to have some standards
about the quality of the reading and writing. Years ago, you didn't get tenure until you were
in your forties and you had demonstrated that you were going to work on your own.
Basically, what you have now is a person whose major research has been their thesis and
they've unrolled their thesis. You learn in your life that for some people, that's the last piece
of research they've done and then you get locked in, ill funny kinds of way. That was a very
tragic f>eriod but it also didn't allow us to define particular kinds of goals at that time. They
made a radical shift, probably a decade ago.
So that the reason our program had trouble is in those revolutionary years of the late
'60s in terms of what happened, the junior faculty decided that graduate programs were
terrible, because that would have meant they wouldn't have tenure. So it put on hold all the
graduate programs for at least a decade. And then the graduate programs were determined by
the superintendent and other political powers were the largest department in the university,
the English department, who had the first graduate program. The next largest department was
the history department. So there's been this kind of -- And then there's been a struggle with
the political forces in the university. We are not a powerful state university. So that we had
put together a package for a very decent aging program far before the aging program was in
College Three. Out of the psychology department, we had three people who really weren't
able to go elsewhere to find other retirements. But a graduate program has to be approved by
a cluster of trustees, and one of them was a Brandeis faculty in their aging program and she
turned us down. You know, so you had this kind of-- John Silber--
Ms. Bell-Elkins: To cut the competition?
10
Dr. Schleifer: Yeah. And the other thing is John Silber -- The one thing he did for his BU
faculty that we never understood, he forced us to restrict our evening college and our summer
offerings because most places make their money in their evening school. He didn't want the
competition and he therefore protected the other universities. Wood was willing to go along
with that. So that was another thing that hampered us. Again, we were the state university.
I think also there's bt~en intense prejudice against this campus. We were seen as the
black college, and throw them a bone and leave them alone. You saw it in a number of
ways. I was president of the State Psychological Association for a period of time. When we
were first here, we had -- A lot of our members were arguing over things we should do for
inner-city kids, but when I invited them to have the annual meeting at the university, they
were afraid to come. This has been kind of a dilemma that we've had and one of the reasons
I've always been interested in the athletic department. We need many ways of bringing
people to the campus so they won't be afraid of what the surroundings are and what their
prejudices are.
Ms. Bell-Elkins: Can you describe what the relationship has been between the faculty and the
administration?
Dr. Schleifer: Well, it's been-- Before the union, it depended on whether you-- There were
sides. There were sides that supported the Chair and there were sides that didn't. I was
opposed to the union for a long time. I thought that when you went to a state university, you
only had to deal with the legislature as with the union. There (lre many things about the
union that I don't like. Just philosophically, it's labor and management now. And anybody
that determines another is sort of kidding themselves. I've never seen labor and management
11
feel-- So there's a kind of pretense on some level that we're in this together. Well, we're not
in this together. They have different determinators. And that's what's happened, since we
have a legislature that is really hit by public universities. I have been delighted that
[William] Bulger is president for lots of reasons. What happens in any state -- Well, what I
learned about the state universities, once you get out to the Midwest, the state university -- in
the state university states is the research arm of the state legislature.
Ms. Bell-Elkins: Right.
Dr. Schleifer: And therefore, the state legislature sees very directly the value they get. Well,
we're not the research arm of the legislature, although the public institution has done better.
And so that-- We have all-·- Weld and Cellucci blocked the pay raises for years. I knew
Dukakis well; he had been my lawyer. I was in planning development at this place and I
learned a lot about pl~g development, but in order to preserve all the space, we ran all
the parking underneath. All Dukakis would talk about was two things: Why did we spend
$10,000 per parking space, as if this wasn't part of an integral plan, and why did we need
such a good library? He'd grind them. For them-- What was their view of us as a university
if they were wondering what kind of a library we have? And he's quibbling about-- We had
$50 million appropriated for the athletic building. He had come -- Dukakis had come to the
meeting-- Ordinarily, we had to take them to court to get the money. There's a lot of things.
The people who were originally planning the place, again, I'll deal with them a little later, but
they understood how to run -- how to create a university education. For example, what they
taught me about architecture is, structure determines function. They are only two large
lecture halls in this university. All the other rooms are for 50-- 25 or 50. So they
committed us to small classes for the foreseeable future in a way I didn't understand when I
first started to come here.
12
The other thing is thtey made a commitment to not have high-level intercollegiate
athletics. So they kept most of the positions in the faculty. Athletic departments are sorted
by faculty positions throughout the country, if you're a state university. You get so many
faculty positions per so many students and then you allocate them. So if you've got a big
athletic department, you know those positions have come out of the faculty teaching. So we
didn't do that. On the other hand, we really had a state system that was vulnerable without
the support of the athletic program here.
Ms. Bell-Elkins: Why is that --
Dr. Schleifer: It's apparently --
Ms. Bell-Elkins: --in your opinion? (Laughs)
Dr. Schleifer: Apparently, they're trying not to support us at all. Then when you're in the
place -- We cleared up under political pressures. People had the fantasy that we are being
royally treated here. The way to understand this whole university from the beginning is the
way you would understand cmy deprived organism. When a family doesn't have enough, it
turns on each other. So we have suffered internal battles with every department with the
fantasy that every department has more money. The surrounding community had the same
fantasy. They had been stealing our athletic grounds with the justification of the state
legislature. Students from all of the athletic stock here, when this athletic program started,
we used to have 10 faculty positions allocated to the -- and all the other money comes out of
student funds and the rental space. The whole university has not had any maintenance
money, you know, so we're crumbling. Neither has the athletic department, this thing is
crumbling now. It needs enormous amounts of repair, and God only knows what's going to
happen five years from now. It manages to hold the whole plan.
We got involved in a. political plan in which we were thrown to the wolves last year.
Some little Pop Warner group decided that -- They used to practice at BC [Boston College]
and they decided that we-- the athletic department didn't do anything for the community.
13
We have more service to tht~ community than any department in the whole university. We
held all the high school athletic events and we-- I mean, and they forced us to let them play
for nothing on the outer fields. And we take this time -- (unintelligible). This is because the
state legislature, they see us in this community and we do nothing.
So there was a tremendous distortion about the role of the university. I think there's --
1 have other kinds of questions I'd be-- I can get some answered. I can't understand why a
student would go to Suffolk rather than UMass Boston. It's cheaper and better. So there's a
kind of a view of us that's still-- I guess, back to Bulger. The state-- The Governor appoints
the Trustees to the university and, if the president ever spoke out against -- If the Governor
wanted -- If the university wants more money and the Governor wants to cut taxes, you get
rid of the president. You've got to get rid of Bulger.
Ms. Bell-Elkins: Right.
Dr. Schleifer: And so we had at least a short time where-- They're not going to be able to
cut us and chill us if he speaks out. And we've never really been able to do it. Again, like
the Midwestern universities like my father went to, the president of the university is talking to
the people of the state, saying, "If you really want your kids to go to college and get a decent
education, you've got to support us." For the first time a president of ours would say that,
they'd have a new Chancellor the next week.
Ms. Bell-Elkins: Did you ever consider leaving UMass Boston?
Dr. Schleifer: Yes. (Laughs)
Ms. Bell-Elkins: Okay. Why or why not?
ltt
Dr. Schleifer: Well, I think I had to make some decisions. You know, I was offered things.
I think if I hadn't grown up in Boston and I didn't have other kinds of commitments, I think I
would have left probably in the '70s when I really had a chance to do some things. I had an
interesting deal at one point, and I started a magazine for families with kids with disabilities,
which is now has a subscription of 35,000. And so I had a chance to do that while I was
doing my teaching, etc. You know, the other thing -- The question again: How do you
measure a faculty? In other words -- I always was involved professionally. I had access to
research and other kinds of things that the poor junior faculty coming from out of town didn't
have. The satisfaction I had hoped to get out of graduate students -- I was on the Smith
School's associate faculty [of Social Work] for 30 years. I don't know if you know -- See, it's
an interesting thing. Basically, they started the doctoral program in '65 and Smith has all its
classes in the summer.
Ms. Bell-Elkins: Right. I'm familiar with their system.
Dr. Schleifer: Okay. And the doctoral students were initially all placed in Boston. So I was
a dissertation advisor and I was more convenient during the winter for them than anyone else,
and I went out once a week in the summer. That at least gave me the kind of gratification-­That
gave me some balance that most of the other people really couldn't do.
15
Ms. Bell-Elkins: What was the mission of the university when you arrived?
Dr. Schleifer: Well, we said it was an urban mission. And we said that what we wanted to
do was produce a variety of very high quality education for inner-city kids. Again, you will
hear from others about the original view of Gagnon, who was really the pioneer, and a
dilemma. As I said, he had the vision of -- notion of education of the man. His basic idea
was good. I guess you would say that the first two years would be like a back-to-basics. But
it was an effort to provide them and it had a philosophy of education. But it meant for two
years the students had less choices than they had in junior high school for courses to take.
So, you know, it lacked some flexibility.
So when the attack came around tenure issues, it was a disaster. What you really
began to realize for the first time when they tried to change the curriculum in a decent way,
there were trade unions here. The English department wanted to retain their power and we
really wanted to control the required courses. And the language department, which was a real
problem-- I don't know if we still have as many, but everything was language and
translation. There was one period of time I thought -- Even if they hit with you with
psychology courses to read requirements -- Freud, after all, was written in German; that could
have been language. I mearL, we had that kind of craziness going on and we still do. Now
when I hear them talking about curriculum, you say to yourself, "How many positions does it
need to run?" And because of the lack of hierarchical order, there was nobody around to
protect the weaker departments. I learned about that by accident. They had a crazy chairman
of the Classics department and they were put into a receivership. So there were three of us in
the Classics department for years. So that gave me another education. We're trying to save
16
· -- They're closing classics departments all over the country and we began to realize, what
makes a university? Is it relevance? Is it -- So those things should be the fabric of the
university. Nobody's --When you're worried about protecting your own department, who's
worried about what the thing looks like as a whole? And I never had any decent sense of the
kind of administration we've had in the last decade. I understand it, but I'm sure they chair it
alL
Ms. Bell-Elkins: What were the biggest concerns on campus during the early years?
Dr. Schleifer: Well, there was one group, as I pointed out, that wanted tenure. The other
thing, you know, we first were involved with-- We were located in Copley Square and the
question was: Where were we going to go? We had wanted to build in Copley Square and
we would have flourished in a different way because most of our students were -- They
worked too many hours, and that's a whole other thing. When we were in the Copley Square
area, the insurance companies absorbed all kinds of part-time labor. So we had students who
would go to class in the morning, work three hours in the afternoon, and they'd come back to
the library at night. We're abandoned out here. If a student leaves you, they don't come
back. It has changed the whole texture of the place. So we wanted to be in Copley Square,
but the business persons didn't want us. Then when we wanted to go to the Watertown
Arsenal, they didn't want us.. The only persons who couldn't defend themselves were the city
dump. So that's where we are; we're over the old city dump, next to a housing project that
didn't want us either, but they didn't have much leverage.
Ms. Bell-Elkins: You talked a little bit about this, but what were the curricular offerings at
that time and how have they changed?
17
Dr. Schleifer: Well, as I've said, there were specific required courses in English and in the
social sciences, managemen1t but there might have been 16 courses-- there might have been
18 and then you could take anything you wanted. And then we started to reassemble kind of
in the last years a curriculum. Again, and partly because of the changing nature of our
students and our faculty, that we started before grade inflation really hit and other things
really -- You know, we had that whole debate about why should you grade or why shouldn't
we. Obviously, I was much more concerned-- I said, "Not grading is lazy," because then
you don't have to make any evaluations at all. And my argument then and always has been is
that students -- it didn't help the students to accept. I said, "When you have a place that
nobody knows about, if they don't trust your grades, what are they going to trust?" And you
start to do what we did where th!! grades are meaningless then. So that was a whole debate
at the time.
Ms. Bell-Elkins: What was your role in creating the curriculum at the college?
Dr. Schleifer: Well, I inherited -- I came at the third year. I challenged it within the
framework that I trusted and I did not want the changes of nothing. I think the other thing
that then happened at the same time was the nature of our student body changed. You know,
I'm not sure if I would argue they were better or worse but, remember, we had some students
-- If you gave a student a C at that time, they were grateful. I had a student who was much
more characteristic before I :retired. I had a class where I-- You know, the term paper was
the last thing they did and I let them turn it in a week early. Somebody turned in their paper
a week early, called me and wanted to know what I thought. I said, "Well, it's a good stuff,
but it needs a lot of work." He said, "God, I did eight hours work on that paper." We really
18
get into that kind of dilemma of -- And so that -- As we take in more students for whatever
reason, unless -- You know, somebody had once proposed that we start -- We didn't deal with
the first two years of college but we started sort of the third year of college and let the junior
colleges do the work. Most college faculty aren't prepared to teach freshmen; they don't want
to teach freshmen; they're not good at it. When we merged with Boston State, we got rid of
the Boston State people, but they were much better at teaching beginning students at the
undergraduate level than we were. And there's nothing in your graduate education that
prepares you to do that. Th1ere were two or three very good junior colleges. If they came
from Cape Cod Community College, they would do well here. There were other junior
colleges that they came from that were disasters, but that would have changed how we had to
deal with--
Ms. Bell-Elkins: I guess so .. How would you describe the internal governance structure at
the time, when it started?
Dr. Schleifer: I felt it was reasonable when they started and then I think I thought it got silly.
Ms. Bell-Elkins: ·Okay.
Dr. Schleifer: And it had to do with the definition of the democracy. Again, I was much
more structured than what they were. I argued that -- I wanted to get the experience was part
of it. I can remember when I was an undergraduate, I had a course with a guy named
Gordon Allport who was really very famous. The world's worst lecturer, very long. I mean,
he could put you to sleep. You know, he would write nine points on the board. Probably 15
months later, I had a decent graduate course in personality at BU Gradate School. I spent
some time organizing my le1ctures and writing them out. 11len I went back to look at my
undergraduate notes and I h:ad not realized until that moment that he changed the way I
taught.
19
So if you kept to this issue of how do you evaluate the impact of an education? Are
you going to evaluate it the day you fake it or five years later? I thought that some of those
people who were senior to me had some sense of what an educational process should look
like. And they should have been the ones that determined what the curriculum looked like.
The radical -- the radical ones, they wanted people to be taught just the way they were. They
were really -- So when you have junior faculty now determining curriculum and then they
added the students, and my argument was students should determine where they were and
fight for that. They should determine why we were out here, a whole sort of things. But
once they were put together,. they were completely co-opted. They ruled nothing because
they didn't show up and a whole host of things. So at the most democratic time, we were the
most dictatorial because two or three people had a lot of time to plan and do nothing else but
plan, plan the way the thing went.
Ms. Bell-Elkins: How would you describe the external governance structure at that time?
Dr. Schleifer: Are you talking about-- Well, again, when you live in a state that doesn't
understand the role of publi': higher education, that's terrible.
Ms. Bell-Elkins: Was there any outside group at that time that really influenced the progress
of the early institution?
Dr. Schleifer: Surely.
Ms. Bell-Elkins: Who?
Dr. Schleifer: I mean, people like Silber and the others, they didn't want it to succeed. The
20
Globe didn't want it to succeed. We've had the most farcical relationship with the newspaper
that you can imagine. I always felt they thought we were blockirig their view of the ocean.
Ms. Bell-Elkins: (Laughs) How would you describe the student body?
Dr. Schleifer: It's very uneven. There's two things about it. First of all, they're the last of
the grateful students. They're not like the suburban students who have been fed too much and
too long. There's a level of-- There's a belief in the educational process that exceeds what it
is and currently we have suc:h a range of things. There are several kinds of students who do
well out here and then we h:ave some changes. There are kids from small towns who have
never realized how smart tht!y were. I mean, the kids from Hanover and Dartmouth. So
there's a group of them that become worldly. Then we've got the Cambridge underground.
The kids go to the ivy league schools and make $40,000 and they go wander around
Cambridge for about five to 10 years. All of a sudden, they discover the other side of the
planet. At the end of the Red Line, there's a university there. By that time, they're older and
the trashing around has taken place and they do very well. And then there are people who
come by accident to be with their husbands or wives and need to finish up college. So that's
some of our best students.
Ms. Bell-Elkins: How was :it founded as a commuter institution?
Dr. Schleifer: Well, that's rough. First of all, the issue of what to do with dormitories didn't
arise until we built this campus. And that was a pledge made to the housing project that we
wouldn't overwhelm them, which was a mistake. We should not have dormitories for 12,000,
we should have dormitories for three. I had proposed two things when I was on the planning
committee early on. I wanted a YMCA-like hotel because kids have such chaotic lives, that I
21
wanted a place that they had to leave their house for the transition and they had someplace to
stay. I had proposed building learning centers in five areas in Greater Boston. In other
words, I did some studies that were long and involved. Basically, our students don't define
themselves as students except on this campus. They're not redefined at home; they're not
redefined at work. And I felt that if you could put one in Everett and one in Roxbury, which
was a building which had study halls, etc., etc., then they could rent even some of their social
events. At least in that building, they could define themselves as students.
I commuted for one semester to college and my parents redefmed my role about my
calling so that they didn't have company during the week, etc., etc. Our feelings don't make
any changes. One of the things we do with the athletic department is we have a dinner for
the parents for the freshman athletes. I tell them why kids go to college and I talk about the
dilemma of a commuting student, but those are the kinds of dilemmas so many of our
younger students have that really aren't resolved. Most commuting schools are based on the
notion that the kid gets his medical care at home if he's commuting. There's no systematic -­I
mean, if we just did a Head Start with many of our freshmen, checked their teeth and their
eyes, that would provide a s~ervice.
Ms. Bell-Elkins: What do you think the future holds for UMass Boston?
Dr. Schleifer: (Laughs) It depends on how optimistic or pessimistic I feel about the no-tax
pledges. That is, I would hope that someday -- You know, when you visit your friends in
California, they don't worry about the tuition issues with their kids. I have two sons that go
to the University of California, San Diego. I could have flown them home once a month for
what it would have cost me to send them to one of the local private universities. So I
22.
discovered that that's the onlly option for the middle class, is to support a strong state
university. And how they're: going to deal with the kind of craziness that we're dealing with
now in the short run, I just don't know.
Ms. Bell-Elkins: What do you think is the greatest strength of UMass Boston?
Dr. Schleifer: It has a very decent target and, because of the structure, we have very small
classes. Our freshmen have smaller classes than BU seniors.
Ms. Bell-Elkins: What do you think's the weakness, though, on the other side?
Dr. Schleifer: Because it's so fractionated, you have the pieces of it. If you meet a UMass
faculty member someplace else and you ask them about themselves, they'll tell you what
college they graduated from:, often not where they teach. And how to create a sense of
identity on the campus itself for the faculty and then for the students has been our greatest
internal struggle.
Ms. Bell-Elkins: Through all of this, what was your most memorable moment at UMass
Boston, or event?
Dr. Schleifer: Well, again,][-- You sooner or later have to decide something that meets your
own sense of self-esteem. Because of the connections I had with graduate schools in
psychiatry and social work, that I was able to get a small number of students into graduate
school every year. That's what I considered that that's what I brought and that's what I could
accomplish. A lot of them have done very well.
I was just reading in the newspaper the other week that one of the early graduates was
a woman named Susan Lind and at 70, she decided she wanted to be a puppeteer. Integrate
that with psychology, she's now the associate director of the Judge Baker Guidance Center in
23
charge of media. She has now put together a series of albums and songs, you know, for PBS,
etc., etc.
We had a whole series of students who-- Remember, the other nice thing about-­This
is the university-- When a student wants to see a faculty member, they don't have to
compete with throngs of 30 trying to see them. So that the students that you work with really
have access to you and so that, I would argue, is the feeling of what did I do. Those would
be the things I feel I enjoyed the most.
Ms. Bell-Elkins: I'm really intrigued. Tell me about your journey from being a teacher in
psychology to really making this link with the athletics.
Dr. Schleifer: (Laughs) Well, again, without bel&boring it, again, I've always worried ever
since I -- I was trained as a clinician with children and delinquency was an area that I -- I
spent a lot of time worrying about what to do with schools. In my own life, the place -- I'd
argue several things. I knew for myself and my own kids -- I have three sons and a daughter,
who all played athletics in Newton -- the only place of integration in any suburban
community is the athletic field. You're judged on whether you can play or not, not who your
parents are, etc., etc. It's really the place for me; the only place I really met kids outside my
neighborhood was on the athletic field so that I always enjoyed it, if I stayed with it. I mean,
I was always on the athletic committee one way or another. When I retired, I had had some
ideas that I'd bid some of and not others. So that, for example, I had believed that, you
know, in a schmaltzy way, that the inner-city leaders were going to come from inner-city
kids. And we had a grant for a year, and a little bit last year, that I just didn't consult
anymore. Again, I'll tell you more about that, in which I had five in the high school; the best
24
male and female junior-- se~nior athletes with some promise. We got the morning jobs at the
university and they brought us to teach in the university in the afternoon. And that's gone
reasonably well and that could be expanded. When the -- When I ftrst started consulting, the
university got a big Kellogg grant to change the way the departments do business with their
students. I submitted a grant in the athletic department and which I felt ultimately was going
to be the perfect model. We got some monies which we used. And I argued that a high
school athlete is evaluated every day and, on the basis of the evaluation, has to change in
order -- And they had to learn through emotional and physical distress. These are the very
skills you needed to learn anything. They were so compartmentalized by themselves, by their
coaches, by their families and by their teachers, that they never really put themselves
together. And I put togethe1r a program to intersect with that. For example, that's what the
breakfast -- the dinner is about. I've got a group of faculty who at least understand that I'm
trying not to make a first alarm system. We've changed some of the tutoring. My niece,
who's a headhunter, gave me 15 traits, successive traits that she learned from sports. Some of
the coaches are trying to use that and we're trying to change that. And the academic records
of the athletes in general is higher than the average student body here, and the same things
we're trying to do with this group here really should be done with all the students.
Ms. Bell-Elkins: Have you ever looked at any of the work that Pat Summers (phonetic)
worked on for female athlett~s?
Dr. Schleifer: No.
Ms. Bell-Elkins: It's very similar too. All of them graduate over 3.5.
Dr. Schleifer: Yeah, I mean it's not a -- Yeah. Especially here, there's no reward. It's a
division of -- With the -- They have this vision that we're a Division I group. This is
Division III. These kids take it out of their own hide.
25
Ms. Bell-Elkins: Just one more question: What would you most like observers or historians
of the university's early history to know?
Dr. Schleifer: I think the people who -- The people like Dick Powers and Gagnon and one or
two others, like Ryan, who really had a great vision that I didn't understand when I joined it,
but as I got to really respect what they really added to it and really how kids need to be
educated. I hope someday we'll reaiscover the vision.
Ms. Bell-Elkins: Great. Thank you so much for taking time out of your busy day to be part
of this history.
Dr. Schleifer: You're welcome.